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Ubuntu

If you haven't used Amazon's Web Services yet, you really should. They are currently hosting more of "the cloud" than their next ten competitors (Google, Microsoft, RackSpace, etc.) combined. And, they do everything in their power to make it easy for you. In addition to tons of pretty good documentation, they also offer a "Free Tier" for you to test the service out to see if it meets your needs. I'm currently running a couple services on mine and, once you get past the initial set-up, it starts to look and act pretty much like the server you have running down the hall.

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my key annoyances with Ubuntu was its lack of an easy way to slip into Super User mode to perform administrative tasks. And, no, I don't consider opening up a terminal and typing "sudo whatever" easy. I recall, for instance, that during my most recent usage of a distro in the Red Hat family, there used to be a way to launch the file manager in SU mode directly, no CLI. Another distro had had a right-click menu option in the normal file manager to open a folder in SU mode. Either way, from there, I could right click launch a file in my editor of choice, also in SU mode, and do what needed doing. But Debian and all it's progeny decided that end users should be protected from the dangers of root account usage by making it a pain to get to. Of course, the best intentions of security architects are hardly a match for a determined yet ultimately lazy end-user.

Something I often see mentioned, but rarely explained, is the concept of Wine (which is not an emulator) bottles. Once I was able to understand the concept, it became much easier to run (certain) Windows applications in Linux. Let me share a little.

About

I'm Dan Ziemecki, the author of this site and a technology professional working in the Atlanta area. "Excellent Cruft" is a journal wherein I log the lessons of my various projects (before I forget them) in an effort to give back to the community. Feel free to use anything you find here.